So hard to find time to write anything. It's been a whirl of lectures, receptions, and visiting friends and family; currently buried under a pile of Hellenistic astronomy and mathematical geography. Sneaking away from Ptolemy and Aristarchus just long enough to say hello.
Matt's father is the current out-of-town visitor, and last night he took us to a baseball game. It was a great time, despite it being one of the worst baseball games I've ever witnessed. The Giants were playing Colorado, and while the Giants certainly weren't fielding their A-team, I think we were seeing the absolute dregs of the Colorado roster. Worst pitching ever, seriously. Their starting pitcher was pulled towards the end of the second inning, with a total pitch count that was more balls than strikes, and the guy they had in when we left (towards the end of the eighth inning) seemed like he wouldn't have been able to find the strike zone with a map and a flashlight. He knew it was going badly, too, and was taking really long pauses between pitches, kind of standing there frozen in terror.
The semester is going well so far--I keep meaning to link to the most recent Teaching Carnival, with special section on "first day of class" posts. My first day of class is best not spoken of here, other than to say that I have learned important things from it. (Namely, do not pack your first lecture entirely full of abstract concepts and theory frameworks.) Today, as our class unit on science in the ancient Greek world made the transition from the Hellenic to Hellenistic periods, I got a little carried away and spent far too much of class time on a step-by-step account of Alexander's conquest of the known world. Alexander is vitally important for understanding why later Greek science had such a different character from earlier work, but that doesn't mean I really needed to spend valuable class time on things like the reasons he burned Perseopolis or the refusal of his troops to move further into India. Oh, and then there's the small matter of my having consistently referred to Alexander's "westward" path across Asia when he obviously was moving eastward. (On that last point, I'm lucky in that I've got a great group of students who understood that I meant "east" even though I was saying "west".)
Euclid is calling, though, and it's back to work for me.
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